Quitter #7: September

Trace Ramsey’s All I Want to Do is Live (Pioneer’s Press, 2017), personalizes common themes of survival, depression, and life in America at a time of division and upheaval. In this collection of essays, flash nonfiction, and poetry, Ramsey examines his family history and shows us how darkness can trickle through generations. He looks to people like his grandparents and his partner for hope and works to move beyond abuse and mental illness to find what is worth passing on to his children. In a unique voice of clean, deliberate prose, he relays stories about the damage of the past and recovery in the present that is both brutal and achingly pretty. As the personal often sheds light on the universal, Trace’s memories of his childhood and the scenes from his life today also give us the story of our time, our country, and a people longing to find substance, freedom, and meaning. The following excerpt is the fourth in a series from the chapbook “Quitter #7 (2013).” For part three, see Quitter #7: July.

I remember it was sometime in the Fall; all day long the cool air dried my throat on its way in, the same air emerging warm and humid, personal clouds of breath falling up and away into the surrounding atmosphere. At the time I was in Western New York. That particular atmosphere was most likely gray and barely concealing the threat of snow or sleet. It was too early for snow, if I recall correctly, even for this small town sandwiched between Lakes Ontario and Erie and its lake effects.

Fallen leaves blew into the street, crashing and skittering into each other like poorly made airplanes. Against that threatening gray sky the variant colors of leaves haloed the random limbs of the nearly empty trees, the branches narrowing to the twigs at the extremities, each little wooden finger moving crisply with the air movements above. From minute to minute these trees are safely bolted to the ground by a thickened trunk and miles of root hairs and fungal partnerships, their leaves safe to depart without harming its own life.

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Beginnings and ends are buried in this particular color contrast; browns and reds fidgeting against the dirty white background above us, those few hopeful, final leaves holding on to that last stage of senescence just long enough to end up right on the top of the pile, the last to land, the last to decay. With the passing hours and minutes, the leaf layer forms on the lawns and the curbs and the shrubbery of the immediate world, not only a beginning but an end point in a constant cycle.

So what am I remembering exactly? The time I am thinking of is just like any other from that point in my life — awake to the boredom of youth, brush against the boredom of family during breakfast. Get on a school bus full of variable stressors and hassles, depart and navigate the hallways and school lunch table seating. Become obsessed with vaguely defined friendships, sexual frustration and the confused and bullying tastes of peer pressure. The cycle is repeated in reverse, the bus empties me at home, the television comes on and the disaster of teenage life hides itself in the couch cushions or the sheets of an unmade bed.

When I was a teen, there were moments in which I laid in bed for an entire day, stomach down, face toward the wall. I was immobile, pushed into the mattress by a compression of something outside of my control, something I did not understand. Breath came short and shallow, the room dark enough to give shadows very little running room into the corners. The sheets on the bed warmed rapidly and cooled slowly, crumpled in the middle and taut at the corners, stagnant under my weight and despite my darting thoughts. I felt like a leaf caught in the bushes.

When you are young, you can’t assign a name to it, this thing, this “depression”. You think it is just a part of life, something that comes along with breathing and aging and carrying a heavy mammal brain. Left untreated the first bout of depression will usually lead to another several years down the road. From there the half-life continues to decrease until a handful of minutes is all that stands between the dawn and the dusk of a depressive episode. For me, I am old enough now that there are no longer horizons on which to seek shelter. It just comes on, a quickly spreading net of thoughts and inaction. There is no refuge, no chance to turn it back. It just comes.

My depression shows up and opens all my doors and windows to the elements — rain, wind, sun, volcanoes, earthquakes. I am forced to greet all of it, begrudgingly welcome all the things I have no interest in revisiting — Oh hey, remember when I punched that parking meter because I got rejected by some girl at a party? Remember when that kid threw my sneakers on the roof of the school?

There isn’t anything particularly emotional about what I feel, just a low energy custody of despair and sullenness, a cold thin soup of presence. My sighs become autonomic; I chew my teeth and vibrate my fingers imperceptibly. I lose words, become silent as a conservation of energy, stare at things as if they hold me upright in doing so.

I become a ghost unsure of my manner of haunting. Depression can be like a frost; unpredictable, furious, disappointing. There is hope that neither will come at a bad time, a time where something is needed that cannot be disrupted, a time containing plans for the future and a singular requirement for growth. A flower, like a healthy mind, brings a promise of fruit.